Under sexual selection, mate preferences can evolve for traits advertising fitness benefits. Observed mating patterns (mate choice) are often assumed to represent preference, even though they result from the interaction between preference, sampling strategy and environmental factors. Correlating fitness with mate choice instead of preference will therefore lead to confounded conclusions about t...

Copulation solicitation displays were used to investigate whether female song sparrows are especially stimulated by the songs their mates sing. Eight of nine (88.9%) recently captured oestradioltreated female song sparrows, Melospiza melodia, gave more solicitation displays and displayed more intensely for song types recorded from repertoires of their mates than for songs from other males from ...

Many species show substantial between-individual variation in mating preferences, but studying the causes of such variation remains a challenge. For example, the relative importance of heritable variation versus shared early environment effects (like sexual imprinting) on mating preferences has never been quantified in a population of animals. Here, we estimate the heritability of and early rea...

Recent studies suggest that individuals who are particularly concerned about infectious diseases show stronger preferences for exaggerated sex-typical characteristics in potential mates' faces. However, these studies have generally investigated individual differences in women's mate preferences and relied on questionnaires to assess disease-related concerns. Here we show that men's scores on th...

Women's preferences for male masculinity are highly variable. Although many researchers explain this variability as reflecting systematic individual differences in how women resolve the tradeoff between the costs and benefits of choosing a masculine partner, others suggest that methodological differences between studies are responsible. A recent study found general femininity preferences for ju...

This work incorporates Selectional Preferences (SP) into a Semantic Role (SR) Classification system. We learn separate selectional preferences for noun phrases and prepositional phrases and we integrate them in a state-of-the-art SR classification system both in the form of features and individual class predictors. We show that the inclusion of the refined SPs yields statistically significant i...

Each month many women experience an ovulatory cycle that regulates fertility. Whereas research finds that this cycle influences women’s mating preferences, we propose that it might also change women’s political and religious views. Building on theory suggesting that political and religious orientation are linked to reproductive goals, we tested how fertility influenced women’s politics, religio...

Many preference aggregation problems are not, by nature, one-shot. In these settings, voter preferences need to be repeatedly aggregated as a function of the underlying pool of options that are being voted over. For example, imagine that a firm votes an offer to a candidate. If the offer is declined, then the pool of options shrinks, votes are aggregated once more, and a subsequent offer is mad...

The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and athei...

Models of indirect (genetic) benefits sexual selection predict linkage disequilibria between genes that influence male traits and female preferences, owing to non-random mate choice or physical linkage. Such linkage disequilibria can accelerate the evolution of traits and preferences to exaggerated levels. Both theory and recent empirical findings on species recognition suggest that such linkag...